Areas of Unrest

20 January 2000 - The Ice Water Stallion Test

QOTD: "A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation." - Saki

Reading: Dave Barry in Cyberspace

Listening to: the original cast recording of The Pajama Game

I've had a thoroughly exhausting week so far and I'm going to Las Vegas for the weekend, which isn't exactly a way to catch up on sleep. Someday I will learn to plan these things better.

The exhaustion started with my trip up to Sunnyvale on Tuesday morning. The problem with getting a 6:45 a.m. flight isn't that I have to get up an hour earlier than normal; it's that I worry about oversleeping and missing the flight, so I don't sleep well. At least I didn't have to drive in my zombified state. Everyone reserves a car, but we cancel half of them and sort out carpools at the San Jose airport because using the carpool lane is essential to maintaining one's sanity on Guadeloupe Parkway.

As far as work went, let's just say that I set a new personal record for writing action items, averaging about one an hour at the meeting. When I came in on Wednesday morning, I just commandeered a stack of action item forms, though I did give several to other people. At one point, I made Millard write up something because I was embarrassed at how many questions I'd asked. I never did learn to keep my mouth shut, but I do think I was raising real issues and not just satisfying my ego.

One of the downsides of carpooling is the coordination it takes to get large groups of people to agree on where to go to dinner. We ended up at a Japanese restaurant in Cupertino, which was quite nice. But I have no idea what the name of it was or where exactly it was, so the odds of my being able to find it again are pretty low.

Despite all the action items, we finished up slightly early on Wednesday. We knew we wouldn't be late because the room was reserved after our meeting for a session with some "distinguished visitors". (This is a codeword for congressman at a minimum, though I believe it was actually two senators this time.) It was nice to get home only slightly later than normal, though I can't say that I did anything particularly useful with the extra two and a half hours at home that gave me.

Today I just dragged myself through work, not really getting much done. The dreary, drizzly weather didn't help my mood either and I was relieved to shut down the computer a bit before 3 and go across the street to go to the retirement ceremony for Lt. Col. V. I always find the military formalities interesting, with the honor guard presenting colors and the readings of various citations and, of course, the reading of the retirement orders. The whole thing took about 45 minutes, after which I headed out to run some errands before going to the retirement dinner.

The retirement dinner featured one idea that I'd never seen before. Namely, in order to limit the length of the speeches, each of the speakers had to hold his hand in a bucket of ice water. The lieutenant who had organized this (and who was acting as master of ceremonies) said "now we'll see who the real stallions are." I'm sorry to say that my management didn't fare very well in that respect, with Milo and Jim barely immersing their fingertips and being teased about the Palmolive method. Lt. Col. V. was known in the program for using certain colorful cliches frequently so many of the speeches were scattered with references to "a doable do" and "open kimonos" and "drilling the issues." The ice water did help keep speeches short, but a few speakers exploited it to full effect. One put a bare foot in, instead of his hand. And he was immediately followed by one of our contractors, who drank from the bucket (yes, the same one that had had several hands and one foot in it at that point). "We need all the points we can get," he said, "so what's that about being a real stallion?" The best line of the evening came from a major who'd worked with Lt. Col. V. on another program prior to this one and said "the first time around, he was my mentor. I took this job and he became my tormentor."

I'm not generally crazy about work-related social events, but I must admit that I enjoyed this one. It broke up in time for me to watch the passing of the lunar eclipse. But it always takes me time to decompress when I get home and I still need to pack for the weekend. I remember that when I was in college (and grad school), I thought that non-students always got plenty of sleep. Ha!